June 10, 2007
2 Pentecost, Psalm 146
Like many middle class, mainline Christian kids, a lot of what I learned--that is actually paid attention to in such a way that it sunk in---a lot of what I learned about God and the church and people, I learned at church camp. For a week or so every summer, I would join about a hundred other kids who enjoyed the relative freedom of camp life so much that we didn’t mind having to pay for it by going to church each morning and having to talk about religious stuff for an hour each day. The chance to run and play and tell stories after lights out was worth having to endure all the God stuff. And so, for most of us, some of the God stuff sort of seeped in over the years. In fact, some of my favorite people is those days were the young priests who ran the camps. One in Particular, Peter Keese, was a favorite. He had served the little mission where my family went to church when I was ten. I liked him then, and I always thought he kind of liked me. We could joke around at church, poke fun at each other...that sort of thing. I though he was cool.
So I was pleased when I got to the teen years in camp to find him running that week of the program. I kind of liked that I knew the guy in charge. Those last three years of camp, he was always there.
One of the lessons I learned in that place I learned the year someone in Memphis decided that the church should send a couple of ghetto kids to camp. Those two black faces stood out in a sea of white like some kind of billboard about the historical times in which we lived. This would have been a year or two after Dr. King was shot. It was about the time that the first black person took communion in St. John’s Church, a hundred year old Memphis institution with a twenty foot tall blond haired blue eyed Jesus painted behind the altar. Those two kids who showed up in the mountains that summer for camp were black and poor, and we camp regulars had no experience with either of those things. The young, sixties, activist priests, though, saw their presence among us as a sign of the Holy Spirit moving through history, stirring things up, making a path for the realm of God to come rolling in.
The lesson I learned that summer was really one among many. There were some things I never said again about black people after that summer. I just generally became careful about what I said, if anything. I learned that a bunch of white kids could be mean and frightened, and that we were also capable of growing and opening their hearts. The lesson that sticks with me though has to do with our psalm today and with how God moves and acts among us.
We hear this morning about the God who gives justice to those who are oppressed, and food to those who hunger. The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind; the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous; the Lord cares for the stranger; he sustains the orphan and the widow, but frustrates the way of the wicked.
It takes a while for such words--and the bible is filled with such words--it takes a while for words like those to sink in. We hear them each week, and they sound good as long as they have something to do with us. What happens though when they leave us out?
I walked up on a little group one afternoon where Peter Keese and about ten campers were sitting in a circle. One of the black kids was playing a harmonica, they were all listening. I too carried a harmonica in those days, so I sat down with the others and pulled out my harp. Peter sort of reached over and pushed the hand with the harmonica back, and with a look let me know that this music session wasn’t about me. Didn’t have anything to do with me. I was more humbled than hurt I think. It didn’t take me long to figure out that that other kid needed all the help he could get entering into that crowd. Peter’s focus was definitely on trying to help these two kids in their week at camp, and when it came down to it, I knew he was going to jump in to help them, leaving the rest of us to get by on all the privileged good times we’d had at camp and in our lives. And somehow, even to the teenager I was, that seemed kind of right.
Since the fourth century when Constantine legalized Christianity and made it the state religion the Church has kept close company with power and privilege. So much so that over its long history it has been surprised when prophets and saints, activists and troublemakers have focused attention on the scriptural message that God favors the poor. Favors.....not just cares for them as a sideline to the real work of blessing the rich with riches, but prefers their cause and company--is moved by their plight, works in history to lift them up.
Jesus told stories about shepherds leaving their flocks to search for the lost. He told stories in which the rich look really bad and the poor are righteous. Jesus got into trouble once for talking about the Elijah story we just heard. Jesus told a crowd that there were many people in the town to which Elijah was sent, but he was sent only to a poor widow, not to the leaders, not to the well off. The crowd didn’t like what they they heard.
One of the Jerry Falafel stories we heard a few weeks ago had to do with him telling Martin Luther King that Martin was mixing too much politics in with his religion. In Central and South America in the sixties, people who had had the Bible read to them by the Church for centuries began to read the Bible for themselves and were surprised to hear God taking the side of the poor. Their discovery of God’s preference for the poor struck fear in the hearts of some of the leaders who wondered what might become of them if the poor heard God speaking out on their behalf. We struggle sometimes with the message that these are the people God wants to help.....these are the ones to whom Jesus is sent.
Sometimes that struggle has to do with wondering if there is a place for us still in God’s reaching...loving. In God’s heart. The answer of course is, yes.
The message of God’s care for the broken and poor doesn’t have to leave us out. Jesus is the great leveler.
Jesus loves and welcomes rich and poor throughout the gospels. He is willing to welcome all, but some can’t imagine counting themselves among the poor and broken, among the bowed down....it isn’t that Jesus excludes them, it is just that they don’t want to be counted among Jesus’ friends.
Jesus loves the rich young ruler who is trying to work out his salvation. He loves Zacheus, he loves the centurion and the leader of the temple who come to him in their need, asking him for help.
We are all human. We are broken...poor in so many ways. We just don’t like having to say it sometimes.
The message that Jesus loves those who struggle in life and that we can honestly number ourselves among such people is freeing.
We don’t ever have to pretend that we have it together when we don’t.
We don’t have to worry about looking righteous.
We don’t have to be ashamed that we still have a lot to learn.
And...when we can have enough compassion for ourselves to risk admitting that we need Jesus, then we can look on those whose poverty and need seems more obvious than ours with new eyes.
Then we might realize that a neighbor in need is simple hoping for what we have already received.
Then we can stand with God....with Jesus and see and love the poor and broken...even the rich poor and broken as Jesus did.
We can celebrate the love of God reaching out to others and we can reach out in the name of God, trusting that when the need is real God’s gaze will turn once again toward us. For it must be true that a God who chooses the poor is a God of limitless resources.
Amen.
JMB